For a detailed comparison of the film with Edmonds' novel, see: Countryman, Edward (1980). "John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk: The Making of an American Myth". Radical History Review. 1980 (24): 93–112. doi:10.1215/01636545-1980-24-93. Edmonds wrote a novel that combined hard research into the dynamics of a social crisis with a form that opened that research to a mass public. Ford made of that novel a film which pictures two forces that must conflict because their nature demands it and which argues that the triumph of the American cause obliterates all divisions, whether of race, class, or sex.